And just how were they facing the future? Even as I wondered, voices
rose in a song, English voices, soldier voices. It was not "Tipperary,"
the song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch the words:

"I want to go home!
I don't want to go back to the trenches no more,
Where there are bullets and shrapnel galore,
I want to go home!"

It was sung boisterously, in a defiant tone of mockery of the desire it
expressed, and thus tremendously gained in pathos. They did want to go
home--naturally. It was sung with the same spirit our men sing "We won't
come back till it's over, over there!" The difference is that these
Britishers have been over there, have seen the horrors face to face, have
tasted the sweets of home, and in spite of heartsickness and seasickness
are resolved to see it through. Such is the morale of the British army.
I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale of our own army
also, but at present the British are holding the fort. Tommy would never
give up the war, but he has had a realistic taste of it, and his songs
reflect his experience. Other songs reached my ears each night, above
the hissing and pounding of the Channel seas, but the unseen group
returned always to this. One thought of Agincourt and Crecy, of
Waterloo, of the countless journeys across this same stormy strip of
water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, and one wondered
whether war were eternal and inevitable, after all.

And what does Tommy think about it--this war? My own limited experience
thoroughly indorses Mr. Galsworthy's splendid analysis of British-soldier
psychology that appeared in the December North American. The average
man, with native doggedness, is fighting for the defence of England.